Last updated by icecreamyou on Thu, 2012-02-02 23:53
We're launching a social networking portal, and planning on setting up a facebook-like feature with user statuses and activity updates. For user relations we're planning on using FriendList module. (From what I understand User Relationships has a bulky API, and Flag Friend has bugs, like inability to remove friends, that aren't fixed yet).
So far here's my understanding of the options:
Activity
Has been around for a while. Works pretty good for the purposes that it does. No support for FriendList module, no Views support. Facebook-style Statuses support in Activity 3.x but not 4.x.
Heartbeat
Uses Rules, which seems like a good scalable thing to do, and has a shoutbox (eliminating some needs for the Facebook-style Statuses module). This also has nice "time ago" piece that Activity module lacks. Has views integration and access levels - groups of users to see in messages.
Activity Stream
Each entry is a node, which I think is overkill for our setup.
Activity Log
See https://drupal.org/node/1279696#comment-4991274 for a comparison of Activity Log to the other modules
I've tried activity and it seems OK, now I'll give Heartbeat a go.
This is a Wiki page, so feel free to add to this feature list. It would be nice to have an overview of the options and I'm sure my assessment here is pretty far from complete.
Cheers,
Andrey.
Comments
Activity
Activity has a lot of momentum behind it. That's the solution I've chosen for my SN work. It does need some work, yet, but it's getting there and has responsive maintainers. It integrates with user relationships, which is my "friend" module of choice. I'm working on panels support for it so it works nicely with advanced profile kit.
Michelle
See my Drupal articles and tutorials or come check out the Coulee Region
friendslist testing
What I don't like about friendslist:
What if User_A didn't want this friendship anymore?
.........
Activity stream serves a different purpose almost completely different from Activity.
So it may not be fair to compare the two.
This is so for many setups and I found an issue related to this
http://drupal.org/node/366476 : only wish there is some easy solution like commenting out some lines in the module code - not looked deep inside yet ...
Activity
I'd like to take this to a new level, collaborate with others who have ideas as to what an activity module should and shouldn't do.
Personally I know what has and hasn't worked with Activity so far, and would love to hear feedback from other developers of such modules to see what did and didn't work for them. What would they change if they could?
There are a few modules out there that have generalized API's that help with recording user actions. Heartbeat depends on Rules and Triggers. I was thinking about maybe trying to use Messaging and Notifications. Either/or could be overkill.
I like the Rules/Triggers approach as Triggers are core. Messaging Notifications are pretty heavy to try to require for an activity recorder... But do we even need to require another API? Can we come up with an API that is simple and yet robust enough to just plug our basics into and still have a uniform way of announcing and recording desired activity on a site?
So I guess what I'm looking for here is some feedback from anyone in order to come up with a new approach to solve this. I'm sure we can architect something that would be the end-all be-all to this highly sought-after feature for people to plug into their sites.
I'm going to create two separate discussions within this group in order to get the feedback from two distinct sects: the people who want to just plug this into their sites, for feature requests and how we want it to work from a UI perspective, and another discussion for code planning where we will discuss other API's and/or coming up with our own. I'll post back here with links once they're created.
Re: Activity
As promised:
Ultimate activity feed planning
http://groups.drupal.org/node/19248 - features, UI
http://groups.drupal.org/node/19249 - programming, technical
Not dependant anymore
Hey was googling and saw this post. Well I am happy to say that heartbeat is an api now, so not dependant on Rules (or triggers) anymore.
regards,
Stalski
Hi...friendlist can do
Hi...friendlist can do statuses almost natively. I ususually do this in combination with form block and automatic node titles. This allows me to put a form textarea where I want and hide the title. Friendlist has the ability to filter nodes on the requester user, which means you can filter your view and list nodes of people you are friends with.
It is not full fledge activity, but for status updates it works pretty well, even for total content-type activity. You can make it even slicker with the Ajax module.
Regards,
Marius
I like Activity, but I'm
I like Activity, but I'm using Heartbeat because of the integration with the Rules module, btw have anyone tried to create a view with Heartbeat (or Activity ) and Activity Stream? I'm trying to combine both output in one view but no success. When creating the view I have to choose between (among others) "Node" or "Heartbeat", if Node is chosen then no Heartbeat data is available on field, if Heartbeat is chosen then no Activity Stream is available.
Anyone?! :S
Heartbeat and views
Hey,
The views integration is not that recommended within heartbeat. Lots of great functionality cannot be achieved with it. Take for instance the nicest feature "grouping of messages" versus the calculation at query time (as views does) of the result.
Heartbeat is very scalable and it is now certainly possible to create nice unmerged views.
If you have still problem with it, contact me ;) . I will be glad to help out where i can.
See http://heartbeat.menhireffect.be/page/activity-streams for a demo example. The big stream page is a combined page with all streams on one page, put a javascript toggler to it. The public activity is displayed with Display Suite.
i hope i helped someone with this :)
greetz,
Stalski
liking a activity is not displaying
am very new to drupal. i am using heartbeat module for activities page in drupal 7. really superb module, everything superb. but for me there is no option to like an activity. i dont know y . any one help me .
Regards
sankar